The Loves of the Doctor
by KendrixTermina
Summary: "Tell me who loves you and adores you, and I'll tell you who you are."
1. Playmate

**Playmate**

She comes over him like a night of velvet and diamonds – whenever she appears before him, it's not long until her heavy perfume takes possession of the air, until the whole of her existence rolls past him like wild torrents of water, blond curls spilling everywhere, supple curves filling up space, opulence spilling toward him, undaunted in her audacity she reaches forward to pull on his hand, teasing, smiling, always holding back secrets –

The story of him and her is a complicated labyrinth neither of them would fully grasp, and it would be a completely different tale depending on whose side you told it from, and they both have bastions of ice hidden inside their hearts that neither fully breached until that final night on Darillium, but even then she knows a simple, universal language by which to make him understand, and exchange what _can_ be exchanged within the confines placed by the tangle of their time lines, the most primal and ancient ways to speak without speaking , for she's a sensual creature, a being caught in the experience of the present moment – But at the same time, she's not the heart-driven fairytale creature that her mother was, a tainted criminal rather than a mischievous, misbehaving girl, she was a cold hard realist broken by the hardness of the world, and as such, she seemed to _belong_ in the dark broken world he wanders in – before finding out where she came from, he worried not for one moment about pulling her in to deep when she seemed already wasted, and he knew for a fact where her path would lead to. He can't imagine her having been innocent, and in fact he would learn that her brokenness precedes her elegance, that her wisdom and independence came after her corruption, and he saw her that way, young stormy thing of raw impulses, that cared not where she had come from or where she would be going, and he had to hold in both his disgust and a darkened kind of paradoxical desire out of love for the person he had seen and would see her become, when she would grow into that once whimsical femme-fatale act when experience and understanding would temper it with a kind of bitter melancholy.

It's not shallowness, in any way, but the way she's wired to perceive the world, to take it all in and fill herself up with it, with all of the pleasure, all of the thrills, all the sensations of pretty things, all the smells and tastes and sounds of the earth – He can't possibly understand it, not this rationalizing, categorizing, abstract sort of being that he is, not him who lives through concepts and equations and far-away bird's eye views, but he can love the _idea_ of it, he can feel fascination toward all the shooting and destructing and stealing that he cannot approve of, the way he's admired the brilliance of many an abomination, and he's still flesh and blood enough for her arms to take hold of him, for the slow rejoicing of her lips to linger, and that way, they make ends meet – and almost irresistibly, he finds himself pulled into her sphere, into those wild waters whose mastery he's still so unversed in after all this time, in all ways overtaken and leaving himself to her lead.

On their first few encounters, he resisted the pain that he knew lay before him, and didn't trust her, besides, not liking the loss of control that their precarious situation had forced on him – He was used to being the _keeper_ of secrets, the one who knows most in the room, and now he knew he was moving toward heartbreak, but could not yet fathom the outlines of how it would happen, and to give in to her was to give in to both of their fates... but yet, despite himself, he's found himself participating, beginning to return her teasing, flirting right back, responding to her touch, not even bothering any more to fight down the pangs of fondness evoked by her sight, and let himself plunge into the sort of abyss he hadn't though he was capable of slipping into, and almost didn't know how to move through, the kind of love that didn't have to make sense, because it took place in the spheres of physical, sensual gut-feeling rather than the intellectual, the kind of person he didn't have to fully approve of because he just understood and could know her through his fingertips, and be certain of her much-tested loyalty without needing to understand in full.

In the midst of all their complications, him and her boiled down to a sacred simplicity in the end, a simple natural intimacy between man and woman, but also, the simple caring between husband and wife, between pieces of a family struggling together through adversity, being there for each other through the hard days that were to come even when, or especially when they were at least partially self-inflicted, the simple, natural love of someone who could roll her eyes at his follies, rage at his faults and still love him all the same, the sort of most obvious devotion that didn't ask how or why.

Him and her was just something that made sense from day to day, in those few scattered days interspersed into both their stories, in the immediate instants it was happening, fighting back to back, running through catacombs side by side, chasing adventure through the veins of history from one moment to the next, a love between an adventurer archeologist and the legendary adventurer she'd come to research, a love between two equal enigmas, natural counterparts, a love between two chaotic rebels that no force could hold, the union betweem two infamous beings that could strike fear into stones, a love between two exquisitely crafted larger-than-life costumes of aura that fit together so glamorously, in great escapes and impressive moments, those moments they stopped themselves to marvel at each other's magnificence.


	2. Helpmate

**Helpmate**

Home, that is, Gallifrey by origin, earth by choice, everywhere through his passions and through his sorrows, nowhere at all.

In the abstract sense, it's a word of limited applicability in his case, a concept that never quite applied and does so even less with every passing year and every chapter that is added to his story, for wherever he goes, a large part of him will not belong.

But in the concrete sense, what he comes home to is the old familiar creak of blue wooden doors, the room so engrained in his mind as to be it's centre, the old familiar smell he hardly even notices most of the time, unless he's returning for the first time in a long, long time, which still happens often enough.

In his ever faster life where nothing is certain for long and every day brings with it a different horizon, safety is racing past those doors and relaxing at the sound of a successful materialization, constancy is tinkering under that console, familiarity is moving his fingers over that good old police box shape, and reprieve is to sink into the console room jump seat after a long day of running.

This is what he can call his realm, his territory, where nothing is new and everything can get its due time to be processed and sorted in, this is where the very few quiet and regular moments of his life take place, where he does little dances under the breakfast table, sits down to read and huddles under a duvet to watch movies – all that occasional pop cultural knowledge must have been acquired somewhere, after all, all those languages must have been studied with some piece and quiet.

Of course, as someone who is quite fond of showing off, he also has many accommodations rather more...frivolous than this, his home and place of refuge is as vast, ever-changing and labyrinthine as he is, and it would have to be, to be his match, but in that spirited dynamic wilfulness, he also finds warmth and a presence that welcomes him, a someone who waits for him to come home, to take care of him, to stop him when he's going to do something stupid and gently push him toward what needed to be done, always there to tidy up after him and give him what he needed, if not necessarily always what he wanted – but after so many years, he knew that he could rely on her when it truly counted, even expect her to know better than he did.

He was, by nature, a solitary wanderer unwilling to be boxed in in any systems he couldn't fully approve of, but just in this one circumstance, he didn't mind being a piece of a whole, to become on flesh and live in a true symbiosis more so than most of his kind ever did, seeing her not as a replaceable device but a valuable partner, and sure, she had been a museum piece when he was a boy, but her long existence had given her room to develop quirks and peculiarities, a critical quantum of awareness and personality even before their long journey, and he wouldn't want to lose that for the world – and by the time he was two-thousand, he was saying that not (just) as a famously sentimental oddball, but as the world's leading expert on time travel.

Of course, there was a time when he much was more of an amateur, the days when they weren't always in harmony, when both their stubborn wills were tempestuous and each of them had their list of things to have a look at, the first years of their voyage together were a merry dance where he could hardly ever hit any particular goal, but despite his blunt pride, he soon came to notice not just her presence but the wisdom she held, that she was sometimes _right_ for all her moodiness, and the simple utilitarian purpose that had once drawn them together – the means to escape – became the basis for a genuine bond that would last a lifetime, and together, they would go further than anyone before them.

She became someone he didn't want to see him putting himself to shame, the form that hope took in his mind, the colour of his personal emblem, indispensable part of him in more than just the obvious ways, the one he preferred to any others –

In his wild, inconstant, somewhat detached and ever-changing life, she was perhaps the closest he would ever have to a "one true love", the one existence that always remained as all others came and went, and so, he was not particularly surprised to learn that she was destined to become his final resting place on that desolate far future version of Trenzalore.

(Any more than she found it unlikely that he should have been promised to her since he first heard her dematerialize in that barn, catching his first glimpse of the manifold legend he would once become a part of)

They wanted the same things out of life, and together, side by side, hand in hand, they had worked together to accomplish them, to unite their resourcefulness and their different, unique existences to get the most of both their lives and grasp more of their dreams than either of them could ever have fulfilled on their own, through their joint, combined power, through her living transcendence and his convoluted, looping journey.

Of course, they were still vastly different sort of entities, if bound together by a sort of common origin, and the confines of their respective existences had only allowed for exactly one point in time where they could truly speak face to face, and even then in a borrowed shape, albeit one that was similar enough to how he would have imagined her if she were shaped like his kind; Even that pronoun was just something he'd attributed to her as part of an affectionate appellation, having addressed her as a lady to contrast with himself, she had been artificially grown as a very distant, heavily modified derivative of a primitive life-form native to Gallifrey's ocean that used to reproduce by budding, not by the merging and recombination of two parent organisms, but since contact with his mind had being a significant catalyst for the ongoing emergence of her ego and a true representation of her full existence in four dimension was simply impossible, she would gladly take a form he was comfortable with, or at least made for a suitable metaphorical equivalent – In the end the connection they were meant to have was that natural to both their forms and beings and that was all they really wanted for it was what had opened all the doors for them, but that brief moment of seeing eye-to-eye, did not put a complete end to their occasional spats and disagreements, but _did_ put them and everything before in a different context by allowing the direct exchange of a few very important truths between them;

Now, when he leant back in his chair, when he happened to find the right room at exactly the right time, when he lost track of time in his tinkering, or when he fondly ran his hand over the console, he did so with a very deliberate awareness of the being who had walked every step of his journey along with him, the one whose support had made his every deed possible.


	3. Soulmate

**Soulmate**

She didn't learn any of his secrets, she didn't intersect with many huge turning points in his existence nor was she with him for a particularly long time. She never learned his true name, nor, despite her asking as early as their second venture together, the name of his native planet, nor anything about the world he had come from or more than a rudimentary outline of his life; When she found out that there had been others travelling with him, it was practically by coincidence. She was not particularly powerful or extraordinary as far as the description of her credentials of her life before their meeting went, just an aimless young girl unsure of what to do with her new found adulthood without many expectations for her future, a high school drop out holding a disposable position at a London clothing store raised by a single mother on minimum wage. She was not very much like him, not even insofar as a human was capable of being; Before meeting him, she had never really considered the world outside her little corner of creation, her group of friends, the council estate in which she lived, her mediocre relationship of two unfinished individuals just passing the time together before they grew up to be what they were supposed to become and moved on to who they were supposed to be with, passing every day inside the walls of a small, small world of which she was a fairly insignificant part; And most certainly, he could never have given her all she wanted – Never could he make her his one and only, or give her the rest of his days, hardened over the years and inept to begin with, he could never have shown her what she meant to him the way she deserved it, never spat out those words, and never could there have been peace or reliability in her life at his side –

And yet, she had loved him all the same, with all the love she could muster, valiantly followed her heart with warm, unhesitating eyes despite their star-crossed odds, and the brief instant of bliss they'd been allowed was all the more precious for it's rarity, and as such, more unique than the scarcest gemstone, the most exotic flower;

For even when she had wanted all these things and felt her heart aching for them, she didn't want them if it was not with the one she loved, and of all the boys chasing her heart, it was only ever him, through the distance, all their differences, all the hardship, and the inevitable doom, and all the pain and darkness she couldn't fully take away, they were still happy, they'd still felt bliss together, they'd still defied all odds for a short time that was now less than a thousandth of life, and still stood out like daylight in what had been a harsh time in his life full of heartbreak, mistakes and misunderstandings; though he would not be in a position to put this together until much, much later, when their time together was a long buried tragic dream, there was a good reason that the Moment had chosen her form out of the many many people in his long past and much longer future – She was the first person to make him truly, fully feel glad that he hadn't died when he intended to on the day he planned on ending the Time War.

Despite his ruinous past, he had been so, so glad to have met her, to have been allowed to get to know her; When he danced with her in the console room after that blessed day where nobody died, it was the first time he could feel happy without feeling like he shouldn't, and when he drank death from her lips on platform one, he took his first real step toward absolution – he wouldn't quite get there yet, it would take many more baby steps before he could get remotely close to sublimating all that pain into useful strength, and it wouldn't have been possible without that day when Martha made him talk about his lost world in New New York, without Donna holding his hand in Pompeii or what Amelia told him on that panorama deck on Starship UK, but those days with _her_ had been the beginning of an often painful healing process; If not for her he would never have met any of the others, or made it to the day when he would be able to do something about the events of that dark, dark day –

She was all he could never be, all he aspired to be, all it would take to complete him. She had the eye for the exact things he always missed, she had the courage he didn't always manage to summon up and the compassion he exhaled above all things; She had the passion he never dared to unleash and depth of feeling he tried hard not to leave behind in the sands of time; She was the truth that made all falsehoods disintegrate simply by revealing its presence; She was the light that, just by existing, revealed where the darkness was, even if that darkness was his own; She made him wish that he could be more than he was, to be at his best at all times and more like her in all ways; And somehow, she seemed to want the same, to have found just as many things in him that she wanted for herself – She didn't know it when they first met, but she was the daughter of a brave, adventurous man and sleeping within her was a spark that, once ignited, could never be extinguished; She was always meant to be this, in the state of full bloom, always meant to become "Rose Tyler, Defender of Earth"; All she needed was, perhaps, a helping hand willing to release her from her cage or a situation that would give her a chance to shine, but what she received was even more than this.

Long before she'd seen him as someone she could possibly hold in her arms, she came to admire his strengths and to be enamoured with his way of life, or at least the best parts of it, the looking beyond your own horizon, the standing up against what should be opposed, the refusal to be limited by one's specific circumstances and live a passive life, the willingness to do something even if no one else would, the spirit of rebellion – She may have been gentle but first of all, she was always and completely human, and always true to her heart, absolutely, be it for better or for worse – So she also had the teeth needed to get by and look out for herself, and the will to go get the life she truly wanted, and in that way, they were alike, when it came down to the deepest, innermost cores of their so-different beings, and perhaps that's what tied them together in defiance of everything else they ever were, though they came from different worlds: In their heart-of-hearts, they dreamed the same dreams.

In this unsteady world where nothing lasts forever, they had touched each other's lives and souls, completing, mending, discovering, changing and enlightening each other, and in the process, came to occupy an uniquely special place in each other's lives that no one else could ever fill.


	4. Mindmate

In the beginning, there are just a few things he knows about her:

First – She is possessed of a rare and fearsome brilliance, a vast and untapped power inexplicably contained in the shape of a girl; Upon their first meeting, she introduced herself by performing a feat he'd deemed impossible.

Second – Her will is a force of indomitable power, an act of defiance even in the darkest of circumstances, an adamant refusal to ever give up that not even the Daleks could break

Third – Though he's met many beings that, in their own ways, could have been his match, she is his kindred in a variety of ways both apparent and lying in wait to be discovered, not just the two factors listed above; With her, the devil is in the details, in the peculiar combination of qualities that transcend the different makeup of their flesh;

Fourth – He has a debt to her that he might never be able to repay, extending much further than just his measly life, and even now, he's only beginning to realize just as far it extends.

Even after all his travels, she is a being unlike anything he's ever encountered, a singular phenomenon he can't quite put his finger on, but he knows that she has touched his life and left him dazed in her wake, hanging on to the glimmer of a chance that he might encounter her again: The oldest story in the universe, this, or any other.

He doesn't know her face, or even more than an approximation of her name or an artificial reproduction of her voice, he can't connect her with gestures, or expressions, or more than a mere handful of significant facts; He does not know the reasons of what she does and why she exists, but he's willing to find out, and every day,he succeeds a little more, yet never in full.

He loves her like he loves the universe, so well-known to him in it's fundamentals and intricacies, and yet forever eluding complete understanding, vast in layers of meaning and yet bluntly humbling in her simple truth, she is the answer he's always been seeking since that faithful day in the barn, the truth that has been by his side all along, she's the light that appears before him whenever he's about to lose his way, and the darkness that he willingly plunged into; She's the sacred simplicity of a trusted friend who stays by his side, and she is engulfing madness of a thousand names; She is the seeker that keeps always thinking, always asking questions, seeking to see the world as he does, ever ambitious to learn from his ways; she yet seeks to teach him things when he'd given up on himself for a long, long time, and, for once, to give back to him what the universe did not, even if that left only her to bear the burdens.

She and him are the enrapturing of deep fascination, complete possession of body and soul, of mind and will; She and him the undeniable magnetism of two equal mysteries that draws them together time and time again, in all of their forms, on all of their paths, in all the many aspects of their existence; If he'd chosen to define himself as a question, then she would always be the answer.

This is not the sweet spring blossom of innocent young love or the intimate steadiness of mature companionship; This is the realm of the tainted, star-crossed and forbidden, fast & furious volatile, and yet more devotion that the world can literally contain; They were written in the stars and yet, chosen by no one other than themselves.

The story of them was the kind of tale that launched a thousand ships, the stuffing of paintings and verses, the inspiration behind serenades and prophecies, the language of flowers and literally allusions; heaven and hell themselves caught in the space inhabited charged gaze of the two dauntless explorers.

 **In spring** , they seemed to be always embracing, his fingers finding the shapes of her neck and face with a strange familiarity, like he'd already held it once before, and sometimes he can't shake off the feeling that he's known her for a long time, and merely somehow failed to notice her up until now; All the losses and humblings on the past cry out for watch out for trap and freeze him in caution and hesitation, and yet all her thoughts are full of her always, heavy with the feverish heat from the rapid oscillation between the youthful elation and vibrancy that her presence restores to his weary life, and the private torment of their hours apart, where he whacks his brains about how to anticipate the inevitable springing of the trap, for he'd seen enough of this cruel cosmos to dare think it could ever be so generous as to deliver her back into his arms after she'd been lost to him by means of his own failure, but it wasn't the world's generosity that preserved his life's work in the cinders of Trenzalore, but _hers_.

 **In summer** , they know knowing, and they know perhaps some of their greatest victories, and what's more, through knowing, the boy who always kept his secrets and the girl who always kept her mask became each others' closest confidantes. After she had fallen through his life, accompanied him in the endeavor of raiding his own tomb and learned several of his most well-kept secrets in the process, after they'd somehow learned to read each others every eye flutter throughout their games of hide and seek, she had, against all his expectations, not run, but stayed by his side, stayed steadfast in her belief that he was worth saving, the finger-snipping and diary-reading principles were a mere formality, or at most, a further step in the steady intertwining of their lives. Those were golden days, and for once, he had respite, and dared to let himself believe.

For so long, he'd held it for certain that the only possible reaction for the things he kept locked away from everyone and anyone could be repulsion, but at the very contrary, the person at his side ended up following into him into his darkest day, and knowing him even when he couldn't recognize himself.

Yet sooner or later, **fall came,** and the howling winds of Trenzalore left the flowers that they'd grown together abruptly interrupted, cell walls pierced by the spines of ice crystals, crumpled, discolored leaves falling like a strange sort of curtain before either of them could fully comprehend the events that had transpired, and in that confusion, things were said, assumptions were made, and steps had been taken.

In the weeks that followed, both of them spent many silent hours wondering if maybe this had been the unavoidable flow of things, if they'd only deluded themselves in the sunny days long past. Maybe they had grown complacent, even arrogant, thinking that something as dynamic and complex as a person, let alone an existence _that_ particular person, could be fully and completely predicted. Maybe they'd forgotten their places and been to quick to look beyond their differences that were now back with a vengeance, or perhaps their mistake was to let down their guards, to drop their masks and veils so fully and expect to be welcomed back all the same.

Forced to question what truly drove them to seek each others' presence time and time again, they could still not deny that they owed each other so much to run for the hills at the first sign of adversity; Whatever else they might or might not be, they were friends, and they were comrades in their pursuits, and friends did not leave each other behind in times of uncertainty and need; Just as people in pursuit of righteousness would labor like a peon in times of harvest just to _understand_ and conquer the unknown anew, for even if neither absolute knowledge and absolute righteousness were within their reach, they would never know if they did not make the attempt, and neither of them was the sort of person who could ever be satisfied with that.

There were many times where they doubted, perhaps some needless mistakes and entanglements made along the way, but in the end, whatever madness drove them to persevere eventually bore fruit, and just when they believed themselves to be at the edge of parting ways forever, they came to recognize their choices and trials of their convoluted journey as a path that all along, had been leading them closer together instead of further apart, and their tempestuous collision as the natural waning and waxing, ripening and deepening of a love that was stronger for their stark knowledge of each others' truth, and the understanding they could give each other for even their failings and weaknesses, and the wild and dark path they had both chosen of their own free will.

It was in these days that she learned of his lost children and the things hidden in his bookshelves, and stopped giving too much weight to the question of whether his arms would ever close behind her as she guided his tense, angular form to relax in her arms;

As far as she was concerned, the heavy branches that were once covered in flowers now bore fruit, and this life, with all of it'd danger and ambiguity, was what she considered her calling.

But just because she had reached a semblance of an opinion, the reality of the situation she'd maneuvered them both into would not be diminished in any way;

There was more to consider than just them both now, more than just one person she would have owed an answer to, and with the weight of her sins crawling on her back, she herself was the one to **unleash** **winter** upon them.

Ridiculous, that he should ever have feared the day he would let down his guard, despaired over the anticipation of the springing of a trap, a knife lodged in his back, or the cost of the truth escaping from his lips; Laughable were all the times he'd struggled with a sentence the exact wording of which he had eventually just done without.

It all paled before the overwhelming truth of this moment: Nothing of what he might call or refuse to call her, nothing of what she did could make their days up until now mean any less to him, or diminish the pain and disappointment he felt now as a consequence of it. So should be the one to tear it all down for an action he of all people should be able to understand the best? Oh, the things he'd done out of guilt; The things he would have been capable of doing if not for one person or another recognizing what he could clearly recognize right now as he looked into her large, tear-filled eyes, the mess she was in, the circumstances that had driven her to these lengths.

Forgiving himself after such a blunder had never seemed believable to him, but once it was her he would have to forgive, the reasons why became all to apparent, and if she could believe in him and show him the path on his darkest day, he damn well could do the same.

Buried seeds and shielded embers could outlast a winter; After all, it was always darkest just before the dawn, and even the darkest, longest nights would be followed by the solstice, and after it, the night of their reunion.

Perhaps it was fate, or coincidence, or her undiminished presence in his still-yearning thoughts, perhaps even something else entirely, but one way or another, their paths did cross again, and once that happened, how could they not have departed together?

It seemed not right that they should part just after the events that had revealed the depths of their devotions and strengthened their understanding of each others' reasons? And why should they find themselves punished for the willingness to put each others' happiness first even if it meant facing loss on their own? Why should they be left on their own at all if both desired to support each other? How could they part when they had still so much destiny to fulfill, and before he could find an opportunity to repay his debt to her in full, each of her numberless deaths throughout eternity?

The year before, she had just assumed that he would always be there the next day, that her own heart was something she could easily control. But after spending weeks in seeming certainty that she'd never lay eyes on him again, after tasting so much loss the past year, she would not repeat that mistake.

In the end, there were reasons why they'd held back, especially him; He knew full well that with his lifespan and unsteady, dangerous lifestyle, nothing could ever stay in his life forever, even one of the few people or entities who seemed to have been an inescapable part from it from the very beginning.

He knew that in a way, she would always be all around him, through the scattered versions of her 24 year old self, but all that was already long over from her point of view; Any such encounter would be a shard of the past with only _one_ inevitable end, a version from her who wouldn't remember him, from before Gallifrey, before Missy, before she cut her hair; His only chance to pay back that debt, to have a future with her and become part of her unique, unfolding life was _now,_ the future that was not yet consecrated, but hers and hers alone was still very much a finite thing, and that would not stop weighing on his mind just because he had decided that he'd rather spend that _time_ with her instead of running away from it.

That was why he'd always held himself back to begin with, but this time, he had actually resolved to do it, to stick it out until the bitter end, to give himself away in full as they both ate up the gifts with reckless abandon while they still could

\- maybe it had been out of maturity, or perhaps just because he couldn't keep himself away from her; Or perhaps after all this time, some part of him wanted to know what it would be like to let it happen for once, to know how it would be.

And many things _did_ indeed happen, but the only part of it that he gets to take with him as an answer is an inkling that it involved devastation like he'd never known before.

In the end, there are just very few things he knows about her.

He cannot describe her face, her gestures, or even her smile; But if he knows _one_ thing, it's that this should not be an obstacle – The truly important things, the lessons, the deeds, the lingering melodies, those would always remain with him.

He'd loved and searched for her long before he'd had a face or an explanation to go with it, and he'd continue to do so long after.


End file.
